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Phenomenology and Political Idealism Timo Miettinen Continental Phenomenology and Political Idealism Timo Miettinen Continental Philosophy Review 1/2015 Abstract. This article considers the possibility of articulating a renewed understanding of the principle of political idealism on the basis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. By taking its point of departure from one of the most interesting political applications of Husserl’s phenomenological method, the ordoliberal tradition of the so-called Freiburg School of Economics, the article raises the question on the normative implications of Husserl’s eidetic method. Against the “static” idealism of the ordoliberal tradition, the article proposes that the phenomenological concept of political idealism ought to be understood as a fundamentally dynamic principle. Against the classical understanding of political idealism as the implementation of a particular normative model – political utopianism – the phenomenological reformulation of this idea denoted a radically critical principle of self-reflection that can only be realized on the basis of perpetual renewal. In order to illustrate this point, the article considers Husserl’s distinction between two types of ideals of perfection, the absolute and the relative, and argues for their relevance for political philosophy. Keywords phenomenology, political philosophy, political idealism, utopia, crisis 1 Phenomenology and Political Idealism Our contemporary age is defined by a paradoxical relation to political idealism. On the one hand, especially since the collapse of the socialist states from the late 1980s onwards, it has become common to refer to the turmoil of idealist principles in both national and international politics. Following the analysis of Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960) – a work whose title was more like a prediction rather than a concrete analysis – our contemporary age has grown more and more hostile towards competing ideals as the fundamental core of political decision-making. Efficient governance and executive institutions, rather than open-ended deliberation on fundamental moral principles, are often seen as the true political doctrine of Western democracies. This has been the situation especially in the post-1945 Europe, where the liberal and republican traditions have not parted their ways as in the case of the US; rather, following the horrendous fate of Weimar Germany, both traditions have primarily stood for the principle of “rule of law” with a strong emphasis on (seemingly) neutral institutions, on juridical and administrative power such as the European Commission or the European Central Bank. In contemporary debates, this development is often linked to the doctrine of neoliberalism. This term, nowadays greeted by more foes than friends, has traditionally denoted a vast variety of ideas that are not all compatible with one another. Following the economic genealogy of the concept, neoliberalism has entailed the deregulation of labor, goods and capital both within states as well as internationally, the extension of the market-logic to all social and political institutions, and thus, the gradual dismantling of public sector and the welfare state. In terms of monetary policy, neoliberalism has ascribed to the monetarist doctrine according to which inflation and deflation are at the root of all great economic crises, and thus, independent central banks (and other executive institutions) are the only way for individual economies to protect themselves against imbalances. In this regard, neoliberalism is a deeply idealist doctrine in the sense that it believes in pre- 2 given rules and principles as the only way to construct a viable system of production and exchange. What, then, has all of this got to do with phenomenology? In his 1978–79 Collège de France lecture course The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault points towards an interesting connection between Husserl and the early German neoliberalism, especially the representatives of the so-called Freiburg School of National Economy.1 This school, represented by economists such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken, the son of the philosopher Rudolf Eucken, promoted what was then called the economic policy of ordoliberalism, that is, the idea of free market-economy with a strong emphasis on economic “order” (Ordnung) that is secured by politically neutral state institutions. This idea, as it was discussed and promoted since the beginning of the 1930s onwards, was of course in clear contradiction with the economic policy of the National Socialist government, which relied heavily on ad hoc solutions such as “work creation bills”, price control, and heavy government spending. The influence of ordoliberalism was rather minor during the Nazi Regime – Röpke, for one, was forced into exile in 1933 – but it served as an important point of reference for the so-called Austrian School of neoliberalism (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek) and for the post-war German economic model in general. Ordoliberalism is still acknowledged as one of the central traditions behind the current European economic constitution, and it explains, for instance, the ideological differences between the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve.2 As Foucault points out, both Röpke and Eucken were influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological insights and emphasized the need to rebuild economics on the basis of the ideal of “rigorous science”. Their basic idea can be presented roughly as follows: Whereas the liberalism of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took its point of departure from the existing institutions of the market-place – of exchange and competition – and tried to deduce certain principles of functioning market economy from these institutions, the ordoliberalists treated this deduction as an example of what Foucault calls “naïve naturalism”. Instead of deriving general principles (e.g. 1 See especially Foucault (2010, 103-105). 2 See for instance Jürgen Habermas’ recent contribution (2013) in the Social Europe journal. 3 the “invisible hand”) from the empirical reality of the market-place, the domain of economy was to be constructed, from the beginning on, as a purely ideal domain of production and exchange.3 On the basis of their understanding of Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” and the theory of types, the ordoliberal thinkers refused to consider the different systems of production, competition and exchange as mere historical and cultural variations, but they were to be seen as modifications of the basic “ideal types” of economic rationalism. Rather than deriving the legitimacy of free-market capitalism from the natural tendencies of the human being, the normative question of a fair and functioning system of production was to be posed strictly within the logic of economy itself. As Foucault explains: For what in fact is competition? It is absolutely not a given of nature. The game, mechanisms, and effects of competition which we identify and enhance are not at all natural phenomena; competition is not the result of a natural interplay of appetites, instincts, behavior, and so on. In reality, the effects of competition […] are due to a formal privilege. Competition is an essence. Competition is an eidos. Competition is a principle of formalization. Competition has an internal logic; it has its own structure. [...] Just as for Husserl a formal structure is only given to intuition under certain conditions, in the same way competition as an essential economic logic will only appear and-produce its effects under certain conditions which have to be carefully and artificially constructed. [...] Competition is therefore an historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected.4 In this regard, Husserlian phenomenology would contribute to what Foucault takes as the basic doctrine of the neoliberal economism of the 20th (and 21th) century: the construction of a rational ideal of governance that can merely be implemented into the existing reality. Following what Arendt considered as the basic fallacy of classical political philosophy, the negligence of opinion and common sense to truth, phenomenology would take its point of departure from predetermined ideas as the 3 Foucault (2010, 120). See also Oksala (2012, 139-142). 4 Foucault (2010, 120). 4 defining feature of the political domain.5 As political philosophy, phenomenology would appear as a fundamentally non-historical way of thinking marked by a complete negligence in regard to existing relations of power and their historical genesis.6 This article aims at answering this suspicion by discussing the relation between Husserlian phenomenology and political idealism. It is the argument of the paper that despite the seemingly apolitical character of Husserl’s own thought, his late phenomenology of ethics and generativity did in fact contain within itself a radical rearticulation of the principle of idealism as an ethico-political category. Against the “static idealism” of classic political philosophy, an idealism that simply articulated the normative telos of human communities in the form of a utopia, Husserl aimed at rearticulating the principle of idealism as a fundamentally dynamic notion that is realized only in the constant process of critique and renewal. Political idealism, as an insistence to think beyond existing forms of communality and governance, can only be fully appreciated as a teleological mode of reflection, which takes its point of departure from the existing tradition but which
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